Cloon Keen Atelier

I’ve never had the opportunity to explore any of the Eris Parfums fragrances, but based on my experience with the newest release, Mx, I’d be very interested to smell the others. If Mx is anything to go by, these are properly-built perfumes, not your average paint-by-numbers niche.

Naturally, one might expect this of someone like Barbara Herman at the helm; her blog Yesterday’s Perfume and subsequent book Scent and Subversion were loving tributes to the vintage perfumes of the past. It stands to reason that someone so interested in the construction of classics such as Joy and Chanel No. 5 would take proper care to ensure that her own perfumes are thoughtfully constructed, warm, solid.

And so it is with Eris Parfums Mx. This is a big, creamy-but-aromatic sandalwood oriental built in the mold of something like Samsara (without the plasticky white flowers), Santal Noble (minus the coffee), or Cadjmere(without the fuzziness), and it smells as good at the end as it does in the first hour.

The name Mx comes from the brand’s belief that perfumes should not be gendered and that everyone signing a form should have the choice of what prefix to write: not Mrs., Mr., Miss, or even Ms., but Mx, signaling to officialdom that one’s gender is really none of anyone’s business.

Although Mx is not a gourmand fragrance, there is something about the topnotes that smells incredibly moreish, like a delicate Indian saffron-and-rose-petal pudding dusted in coconut. The saffron is very soft and orangey, and I also smell a lot of cocoa powder, its faint bitterness interacting nicely with the creamier notes. The oily, dark Ethiopian frankincense smells almost anisic, or licorice-like, more like myrrh than frankincense.

Given that the whole idea behind Mx is its gender fluidity, the sweet, creamy components of the perfume are immediately balanced out by a brusque, more aromatic side. This comes in the form of Australian sandalwood, its sturdy, dry character emphasized by a musky cedarwood. Australian sandalwood can be sour and piney, but not here – in Mx, it is merely handsome in a rough-hewn way, the perfect counterbalance to the creamy orange and spice. Some aspects of this creamy-aromatic dichotomy remind me very much of Cadjmere by Parfumerie Generale, but Mx is far more complex.

There are no flowers here, nothing powdery or dated: simply that ancient lure of the dry and creamy push-pull of sandalwood. If men are handsome and women are pretty, then we might call Mx good-looking and leave it at that. Gender-wise, there is truly nothing here to tug it in one direction or the other.

A second sandalwood phase occurs when the vetiver moves in, characterized by a grassy, hazelnut texture that’s (again) both dry and creamy. There’s a beguiling Petit Beurre accord here too, wheaten and buttery, the sort of thing that makes me feel that a perfume is nutritious somehow. That pale gold wheat-nut-grain texturization is reminiscent of other milky sandalwoods such as Bois Farine (L’Artisan Parfumeur) and Castaña (Cloon Keen Atelier). In my opinion, there cannot be enough perfumes in the world that do exactly this. I feel nourished just by wearing it.

Eris Parfums calls this perfume “a luscious woody animalic for all genders” and I agree with everything but the animalic part. It is a warm, inviting perfume, but the castoreum in the base just adds body to the leathery notes supplied by the birch tar. There is no dirtiness, no civet, no musk notes. It is more a woody gourmand than animalic; a touch more cinnamon or clove, for example, would push Mx into Musc Ravageur territory (itself a rich doughnut oriental rather than a true musk).

The smoky, woody, leathery base disturbed me at first, because it had a faint “steel wire” aspect to it that I associate with the powerful (sandblasting) woody-leathery aromachemicals used in so many niche fragrances. But with subsequent testing, I realized that my nose is so over-exposed to these woody ambers that my brain sometimes shortcuts to them even when natural materials are used (cedar, birch tar, certain amber accords).

In short, Mx is durable and long-lasting; but it genuinely doesn’t seem to get there on the back of those chemical power tools Luca Turin talks about. Its warmth and expansiveness is all hard-earned, achieved thanks to a properly designed beginning, middle, and end. It might seem redundant to mention that, except to people who’ve smelled enough niche to know that (a) ain’t nothing new under the sun, and (b) solid construction is not a given. Mx is fantastic work and well worth investing in if you love rugged sandalwood orientals and can’t hack the white florals or ylang in Samsara. Or, indeed, if you just love beautiful, well-made perfumes.